This is the first major sociological report on the lives, status and public policy needs of the Chicana elderly, a population which is generally poor and has been stereotyped as widows and grandmothers. Elisa Facio offers insight into how Chicana elderly cope with their economic and cultural marginality, and how they gain the personal and financial resources they require. The book relates how scholars and public policy makers have previously understood the world of Chicana elderly, and provides new data on the social meaning of Chicana old age, specifying implications of that meaning for future policy makers.
What is known about the influence of ethnicity upon drug use? How can this knowledge be used to develop prevention programmes for multi-ethnic youth? Contributors to this invaluable book address these and other pressing questions. They consider specific problems and challenges confronting researchers involved in studying substance abuse in minority communities; explore explanations for racial and ethnic differences in drug use; and examine possible risk and protective factors which influence use. Current drug abuse prevention models in settings including schools, communities and homeless shelters are also presented.
Provides a geographic window on the pressing social issues of our time. This book covers topics such as: cultural diversity and immigration; income, poverty and unemployment; lifestyle risks including drug abuse, smoking and auto fatalities; access to medical care; medical costs; status of women, and senior citizens; marriage and divorce and more.
The problems of mixed race families in a racist society are fully explored in this qualitative, narrative study. Interviews with 21 biracial couples offer deep insights into their relationships and how they perceive society has viewed their marriages. The interviewers, a biracial couple themselves, ask their subjects such questions as how their churches, families, friends and community treat them and their partners. They also examine the interactions between spouses in biracial marriages and relationships between these couples and their parents and children.
A knowledge of the social context in which HIV transmission occurs is useful when trying to understand the AIDS epidemic. This broad-ranging book offers an overview of our current understanding of the social conditions and contexts of the spread of HIV infection. The author examines the social epidemiology of HIV transmission in its different manifestations in the developing world and in the west, looking at heterosexual and homosexual transmission, sex tourism and prostitution, injecting drug users, haemophiliacs and transfusion recipients. He goes on to look at reports of sociological studies of risk behaviour among men who have sex with men, among heterosexual and bisexual men and women, and among those who share syringes. Drawing on his own research, Michael Bloor presents a critical examination of the different theoretical models of risk behaviour and considers their implications for disease prevention. "The Sociology of HIV Transmission" should be useful reading for academics, researchers and students in medical sociology and in health, sexuality and youth studies, as well as for health and social work practitioners working in areas related to AIDS, health promotion and education, and sex education.
The problems of mixed race families in a racist society are fully explored in this qualitative, narrative study. Interviews with 21 biracial couples offer deep insights into their relationships and how they perceive society has viewed their marriages. The interviewers, a biracial couple themselves, ask their subjects such questions as how their churches, families, friends and community treat them and their partners. They also examine the interactions between spouses in biracial marriages and relationships between these couples and their parents and children.
This work is an assessment of, and a contribution to, the development of a sociology of medical knowledge - including the construction of medical opinion, the fabric of medical discourse and the medical construction of the body. Extensive research on the work of haematologists is used to demonstrate the strengths and weaknesses of the existing understanding of medical knowledge. Topics covered include: the place of interaction among doctors, rather than between doctors and patients, in defining the construction of medical knowledge; the ways in which clinical opinion is socially produced and the nature of the local settings in which this process occurs; and the relations between medical knowledge, medical language, and the increasingly technological contexts of contemporary medical practice.
This exploration of marketing and consumer behaviour comprises original articles, both theoretical and empirical, and serves as a sourcebook for those interested in consumption and managerial consequences. Issues discussed include: elements of the marketing mix; advertising and promotion; relationship management; managerial intervention and stakeholder response; organization behaviour; economic development; class-and-gender-linked consumer behaviour; and the production of consumption. They are examined using anthropological perspectives and methods ranging from materialistic to semiotic.
Why, asks Daniel Rancour-Laferriere in this controversial book, has Russia been a country of suffering? Russian history, religion, folklore, and literature are rife with suffering. The plight of Anna Karenina, the submissiveness of serfs in the 16th and 17th centuries, ancient religious tracts emphasizing humility as the mother of virtues, the ......
